Definitions

Agriculture

Construction

Food

A round, hemispherical, white or brownloaf baked on a flat tray, sometimes with a cross incised on the top before baking

Slang

verb (to give someone) a pinch or poke in the buttocks. In this sense the word, originally a dialect term for a lump or a protrusion, can be dated back to the English slang of the later 18th century.

Travel

noun a round loaf of bread

Banking

acronym forCommission des Opérations de Bourse

(written as COB)

acronym forCommission des Opérations de Bourse

(written as COB)

noun the body which supervises the French Stock Exchanges (the equivalent of the British SIB or the American SEC).

Electronics

acronym forchip-on-board

(written as COB)

Origin & History of “cob”

Cob has a bizarrerange of meanings – ‘nut’, ‘horse’, ‘male swan’, ‘loaf’, ‘ear of maize’ – but a distillation of them points back to an original ‘head, or something similarly rounded’ (cobnuts and cobloaves, e.g., are spherical, and the maleswan is the ‘chief’ or ‘leader’). It is therefore tempting to see a connection with the now obsolete cop ‘top, head’ (probably represented in cobweb), and even with Latin caput ‘head’.